


Die every day (a long time on the way)

by Kangoo



Category: Original Work
Genre: Background Relationships, Background characters that become relevant two centuries later in the canon, Canon Backstory, Duelling, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Original Character(s), Pre-Reincarnation, Prequel, Sibling Rivalry, dear god i can't believe i finally posted something about those fuckers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-07 03:25:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16400453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kangoo/pseuds/Kangoo
Summary: We do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees; we die every day. […] It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out; similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.— Seneca





	Die every day (a long time on the way)

**Author's Note:**

> content of my own ocs? posted on ao3? it's more likely than you think
> 
> meet my dysfunctional family of chronically-reincarnated edgy idiots. can you tell i've been listening to hamilton on repeat lately?

The twin have been at war for as long as they can remember.

(That’s a lie. They remember better times as clear as if they happened yesterday; they simply can’t comprehend how they could ever act like friends when the thought of it now brings them more disgust than nostalgia.)

Of course their personalities are drastically different, and they are only similar in how selfish they will be in the pursuit of their personal goals, but such things have failed to turn siblings against each other many times before. Maybe the Klersfields never knew how to do things in moderation, not even sibling rivalry, or maybe it’s the magic in their veins that won’t let them be anything but bitter enemies. It doesn’t matter.

The escalation of hate has been going on for years, the feud reaching new heights of petty revenge every week, if not faster. As children, Aloïs stole the last slice of cake; a decade later, then-law student Samaëlle swindled him out of their late parents’ estate, forcing him to join the war just to support himself on a soldier’s paycheck. Today — almost another decade later, short by a few months — he had her lover poisoned, a personal attack whereas most before were targeted at her business empire.

He has had _enough_ of corporate espionage and sabotage. He had pirates pillage her shipments, set fire to her warehouses, killed her employees, divulged her involvement with organized crime syndicates and generous use of corruption, and yetshe still walks free, persists to survive through his plan. Assassinations didn’t work either — they were soldiers on opposite sides of the war and are both intimately aware of the other’s abilities.

Maybe that is why her numerous attempts at sending assassins after him are such an insult, more than anything else she ever did. She ruined his reputation, killed the people she couldn’t lie and blackmail into publicly rejecting him, had his own lovers sent across the globe — ever out of his reach — and still she persists to believe a single man with a knife could get rid of _him_.

In the end, there is no single last straw — only a million drops of blood slowly filling up the cup until it overflows.

They fight, they argue, they undermine each other, ruin every plan the other tries to bring to fruition, and at some point along the way Aloïs decides, _enough_. Enough with the lies, the constant scheming to bring the other down without risking their own neck in the process. They were soldiers. Let them solve this like soldiers: with a duel.

One of them will die. Let marksman abilities decide of who.

He doesn’t act on it right away, of course. You do not engage in a war against your own twin without being ready to learn something from them along the way, and one such thing the conflict taught him is patience — a difficult lesson, preceded by numerous failures. It ought to be a virtue, if only he didn’t use it to such nefarious means.

Cunning is another. War takes strategy, but nothing like the underhanded tactics required in an open conflict against Samaëlle Klersfield — he hates her, but even he has to admit she is as brilliant as she is devoid of any kind of morals.

Which is why he has her lover poisoned rather than sending her an official dueling notice. She’d just laugh and send it back coated in cyanide like all the previous times he tried the same tactic. The best way to get her to agree to such a stupid plan is to make her angry. And Sam, always the opposite of her twin, is not easily moved to anger: everything she does, she does it coldly, methodically, with a kind of detached mercilessness, like she doesn’t care about the matter but the success of her endeavor is a matter of pride.

The only exception to that rule is her lover. She loves the woman the way only the criminally insane can: single-mindedly, obsessively, _possessively_ , using a massive amount of her wealth to spoil the woman with riches and exotic components for her harebrained experiments. And she oh so does hate it when Aloïs touches her things — even more so in a way that she could have easily avoided, if only she’d been more attentive.

Doing it with poisons, now that’s just adding insult to injury.

She is _furious_.

Her lover survives, if only just, but the fact is the same: Aloïs harmed what is hers by _right_ , harmed the only thing that was supposed to be out of his reach — in the same way she only ran his favorite bedwarmers out of the country rather than killing them, out of basic decency. He has to pay. He _will_ pay.

So when, in the middle of her rampage, a letter comes to her, another off-hand insult in the form of an offer to duel… she is just angry enough to accept.

He smiles at the terse letter he receives in response, written in a neat hand on a paper too big for the three words written upon it: _Tomorrow. Mortlake. Dawn._

The cemetery, then. He chuckles. That’s that much less distance he’ll have to walk to bury her.

 

The ski is still dark when they meet, the sun barely a red glow at the horizon.

Aloïs takes a moment to watch her. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other in life in— oh, seven years, maybe? Ever since she’s moved from the ancestral Klersfield estate in the countryside to better manage her business from London, they have made a great deal of effort to never meet in public, for the sake of the people of London. Even before that he used to only see her in newspapers, beside articles about her sprawling empire, and the sight of her disgusted him to the point that he hired someone only to cut such articles from his daily paper before it makes his way to his desk. The holes, of course, were a constant source of frustration as they reminded him of her continued presence in the world, but it was a lesser evil.

She’s changed since then. Matured, of course, in a way only discernible to him, who has kept a clear image of her in his mind as motivation to go on just to spite her. She doesn’t have a single wrinkle — they are only thirty and have been blessed with excellent looks in the face of time — but her golden eyes are harder, fury raging in her eyes but unseen in her impassive expression.

He always has envied her this inscrutability. He knows himself to be an open book, and although he has turned it into an advantage — he is a much better liar than her, capable of great, completely fictitious yet believable tales whereas she can only offer falsehoods deadpan or not at all — he still sometimes wishes people wouldn’t be able to read his every emotions, feigned or not, on his face.

He’s tried, but it only makes him look constipated.

Apart from that, of course, they are perfectly alike. Same pitch-black hair and golden eyes, although her pupils are slit like a snake’s; same porcelain skin; same bone structure, delicate and almost other worldly — an enduring trait from a distant fae heritage. It’s infuriating.

She watches him similarly from the other side of the small burial ground, her second standing nervously a step behind her. He’s taller than her by a good foot, a lanky, awkward giant of a man with cruel looks but none of the attitude. Jason, her lieutenant and enforcer. Aloïs knows him; he’s responsible for the loss of his eye, the wound now hidden under an eyepatch the man keeps fidgeting with.

Vampires can heal anything, but they can’t regrow limbs. The eye sits in a mason jar filled with formaldehyde on Aloïs’ shelf, a gruesome but eternally entertaining display.

Oddly, there is a third person present: her lover, Tahlia, stands beside the two of them. She looks pale and sickly still, but resolute as she refuses to hold onto anyone else. She must have insisted to come with despite her state.

His own second is his secretary, Alaude. She’s smart, and he’s pretty sure she can at least be trusted to hand him his pistol. It’s not like they’re expecting the seconds to settle this dispute: it’s only a matter of appearances. There are two letters in her breast pocket, perfect copies in his own penmanship to be sent to his lovers at the unlikely event of his death. If they are ever sent, he’ll be glad to no longer be on this earth to live through the consequences.

He expect a similar letter to be sitting on Sam’s desk, waiting to be found by her mistress if she doesn’t come back to burn it herself.

They both know and trust the doctor. Iris has patched them up countless times before, and is painfully aware of their feud. He believes the death of one of them might scar her forever, but that’s hardly his problem.

Jason and Alaude meet and talk in tense whispers before exchanging a long look Aloïs can’t quite describe. Right. They too never expected any resolution to happen here without a bloodshed.

They are barely a foot away, closer than they’ve been in decades, but not a word is exchanged between the twins as they each take hold of their pistol, provided by a third party as neither could be trusted to not cheat. This is not the time for words — apologies or insults, taunts or goodbyes.

They walk ten steps away from each other, facing opposite directions. Then, they turn around, weapon drawn.

Their seconds intone the countdown in uncanny unison.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine-”

Aloïs’ finger doesn’t so much as twitch in anticipation, or his arm quiver in strain. You can take the soldier out of the war but you can’t take the war out of the soldier; he will never unlearn how to wield a pistol with deadly precision.

“Ten, fire!”

Two shots ring out at once. Lightning strikes Aloïs in the shoulder, throwing his arm back as he bites back a cry of pain.

He’s surprised she only hit his shoulder. She’s always been an excellent shot.

Twenty foot away, Sam blinks in quiet shock and lifts a hand to her stomach. Blood seeps through her white shirt like a blooming flower, just a little off from her heart.

Of the two of them, he always was the better marksman.

Her brows furrow together in perplexity, then she looks at him with resignation. Her pistol slips from her fingers; her legs give out from under her and she collapses on the ground, barely kept from hitting the ground by her second’s quick reflexes.

He and Tahlia lay her on the ground and the doctor jogs up to them, but Aloïs walks calmly toward his sister. He stops next to her as she feebly waves away the doctor’s care, mumbling about how pointless it would be to try to save her. She glances up toward him and, in a look, both her companions reluctantly step away too.

Aloïs hands his pistol to Alaude and kneels down next to his twin.

“Good shot,” he offers. “Shame you only nicked my shoulder. It would have been- poetic, if we had killed each other in a duel.”

 _Nicked_ , ha. It will be a miracle if his arm ever works like it used to, with a wound like that.

Her lips twist into a mocking sneer and she lifts a trembling hand to his face. He moves to hold it — her first, last and only act of forgiveness in her life, maybe — but she avoids it with more dexterity than a woman at death’s door has any right to have.

Her fingers touch his forehead, right at his hairline, and he feels her draw something there in a few quick movements, grinning as she does. There’s blood on her teeth, he notices distantly, before his common sense makes him lurches back.

“With my blood I bind thee,” she gasps in a painful-sounding wheeze. “to the ground that saw you into this world and will see you out of it. May you- may you not shift for as long as I cannot-” she coughs, spitting blood over her chin. “-and may you _never fly again_.”

He jumps back but it’s too late, and she drags a chuckle out of her bleeding out body. The weight of her magic bears down on him like chains, blood burning into his skin. The comforting warmth of his own magic twists and contorts into something strange and unfamiliar, fire turning dim and cold as all whispers of his shape shifting falls into the darkness of his consciousness, forever in sight and out of reach. Suddenly his wings feel their weight, heavier even; he misses his landing and collapses to the ground, tripped by his own feathers.

She is still laughing.

Of the two of them, she has always been the more powerful witch.

He stumbles to his feet, half-running from her in pure, wild panic. He catches a glimpse of Tahlia putting Sam’s head in her lap and carding her fingers in her hair before Alaude takes his arm and guides him away, and once she does he doesn’t look back, not even when he hears her weak voice asking Tahlia, “Will you stay with me while I die?”


End file.
